EFF: Cops' spyware for parents is insecure – and a fat waste of money

"Suffolk County Sheriff Vincent DeMarco has bought 43,000 copies of the software and distributed it to his constituents. Totally coincidentally, the firm selling it has contributed nine times to his reelection campaign."

Would that not be fraud; and possibly money laundering, to name but two?

New In This Version

Store the keystrokes of every user on a PC, save them unencrypted locally, and also have them sent as plain text to a third party server God knows where.

Give me the boy and I will.imprison the man.

I am not saying this is the case but given the relative ease that this software can be accessed with, the limes of the FBI, NSA etc could use this for profiling youngsters and denying them employment or finger pointing in various types of criminal case , based solely on their online habitsa s a kid.

Cop types don't exhibit much imagination they just look for the easiest nick or scapegoat.

"[...] large numbers of copies have been purchased with funds seized under civil forfeiture laws. These statutes allow police to seize any property found that they believe may be the proceeds of crime and spend it on their own budgets, regardless of any actual criminal convictions."

With laws like that the police won't need any budget at all. They can just suit themselves, and take what they (claim to) believe to be proceeds of crimes, and then splash it out at their own whim? And the victim (suspect) will never see their property again, even if they are cleared of all charges (or not even trialled in court at all)? Seriously? Surely there must be some misinterpretation of the law here. Please tell me that this isn't true.

It's even worse than the UK

At least here you have to have been convicted of something before the cops can seize your assets. But at that point anything the cops say has to be treated as true - they can whatever amount they like as "proceeds of crime". They claim what are maybe reasonable amounts when they catch the big boys, but when they catch the shrimps they claim amounts so large that no-one in their right mind could believe them, but the courts have to accept them - and make an order to seize current assets but worded such that if the victim starts earning a wage and saving a few pennies the cops can collect those savings because the current assets weren't didn't cover their original claim. I don't think any of this goes to our cops, so it isn't greed that motivates them to inflate the figures - it's just malicious viciousness. So not quite as bad as large chunks of the USA - but maybe, as it's malice rather than avarice, it suggests that some of our cops are nastier than the USA version.